


Bombyx mandarina

by 35grams



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Aerial silks, Enemies to ?, M/M, OSHA violations, Slow Burn, acrobats
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:27:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21797611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/35grams/pseuds/35grams
Summary: He had never seen anyone move like that. Soaring as if he was born in the air. Diving as if he would sooner die than walk.
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	Bombyx mandarina

A man emerges from shadow. Pillars of light crumble through black feathers and shatter over broad silver paint spilling over the rise of his cheekbones and the arch of his brows. Light shears the single length of fabric wound round a small wrist. He hovers a story or two or three over a still pool.

He unfolds his limbs and examines his guests in the sharp, deliberate manner of a jackdaw or a crow. He is aloft now by his ankle, then by his other wrist, and then by nothing at all. 

When he dives, the theater disappears. All of its lights and platforms and rigging are motes of dust in his wake. The line snaps taut and spears him back into the charged air in a great arc as his wings unfold. He rips gasps from breathless chests.

He had never seen anyone move like that. Soaring as if he was born in the air. Diving as if he would sooner die than walk.

"Erwin?"

He comes back to himself, to this chair opposite the executive producer of Cirque de la Lune, who for the past hour has been trying to convince her studio's lead acrobat not to resign the post he's held for five years. He reassures her that she has his attention and repeats his intentions.

Let's not be hasty, she says. Let's call it a sabbatical, she says. Her desk overflows with papers, tablets and laptops. Her phone has pinged with three separate reminders in the last five minutes. She is busy. Everyone here is happily, electrically busy.

When Erwin missed his cue once, then twice, then three separate times in under a week, the first thing he remembers feeling before panic and duty propelled him forward was not shame or embarrassment. It had been relief. Let me go, said the uninspired arc of his limbs when his tongue could not. 

The morning after, his mouth joined his body's surrender. Two hours after he walked into her office, he passed out of the heavy, ornate doors of the theater for the last time.

When he returns to his flat, he spends the day cleaning and packing his things. He doesn’t know where he is going, but he can’t stay here. As he separates the _keep_ from the _donate_ , he finds one of Mike's old shirts. 

Erwin misses the peak of the media shock of his exit by gorging on old sitcoms on the longest greyhound route on offer. His fingers itch for his phone at all hours, but he defeats the compulsion in the beat or two it takes to unlock it, to recall the new code he set and labyrinthine path of folders he'd thrown his apps into in order to throw up barricades between himself and accounts brimming with the smiles of a past life. He blinks ink and feathers out of his swimming eyes a few midnight miles past Denver.

Blogs wonder what became of the Olympian-turned-lead performer for one of the largest productions on earth. Early speculators who had caught on to his less frequent posts dig into the theater's official statement, into the accounts of other performers, even try and get in touch with his old agents.

Mike texts him the next morning. He asks if the reports are true. He asks how he’s been. Erwin workshops a reply for an hour as the sweltering bus lurches on cracked roads, abandons it, and finally gives him a hurried _great just taking a break_ at a pit stop hours later.

An old friend in Reno shows him the gyms with the fewest busybodies. He partners with one that serves mostly locals and becomes a personal trainer. Friends and family back home get replies with just enough winking emojis or sensible chuckles to suggest that this is just one of those things haughty, flighty artists do from time to time. I'll be back before you have time to miss me, he lies.

He struggles in that first week. He understood in theory that mentoring star athletes as eager as they are limber is a bit removed from pushing half-hearted men who come at the insistence of their wives' coupon discounts to remember how to lift with their knees. 

The calls keep coming, until they don't. Rumors grow elaborate and nonsensical until some new scandal demands attention. Mike doesn't text again.

He can bear the solid, immovable earth for only so long before he books time at a gym with more robust aerial equipment, wraps himself into the air, and takes his first unburdened breath.

Four weeks ago, Erwin received an invitation to a performance by the Under. A little-known permanent Vegas show without a pixel of marketing yet whose seats could feed and clothe a city county for a week or two. A handful of grainy videos of the performances have leaked since it opened some ten years ago, and though what little could be squinted at had impressed him, Erwin gave this billionaires' playground no more thought. He nearly turned it down, this gift from a friend of a friend of some vulture capitalist who'd called in sick. Maybe he should have. 

A satisfying burn scores down his arms as he lifts his legs above his head and finds his balance on one wrapped hand.

Three weeks ago, Erwin took his seat among tech child-emperors and sagging old-money scions. That audience couldn't have passed fifty in number and was arranged around dining tables scattered across several elevations around a circular center stage. He'd frowned at the ushers' fussiness - no electronics of any kind, no white clothing, and nothing more reflective than a cloudy gemstone. Though the average guest that walked into that theater sweats diamonds and sighs dividends, the seating and preshow set was alarmingly plain. Nearly every item in the theater was black. Erwin suspected half-seriously that even the ingredients in the decent but overdesigned menu were chosen to reflect as little light as possible.

When the lights dimmed, he understood why. 

The theater became so deeply, aggressively dark that in seconds, his eyes screamed for something, anything, to witness. His ears were treated to the guests' surprised gasps before they, too, had to make do with the rush of his own blood. 

Erwin escorts his elderly client to the locker room and slips into the gym with aerials on his way home. He taps his muscle memory for a few tricks his former production lead judged too risky, too theatrical, too slow, too fast. He hadn't had the time to practice them with a full show schedule. Now, he has all the time in the world. 

A man emerged from shadow. Nothing else existed in the universe but him. Nothing else will exist for the next two hours, and for all the others after that. 

Erwin's body had returned to work the next day, but little else of him. He leapt and smiled and bowed through the end of the season like a marionette until his strings began to fray. Until his leaden puppet limbs refused to leave the solid earth.

He is good at what he does. He is proud of his work. But he is nothing like that man. Every performance owes a debt to the artistry of the lighting and rigging crews and of makeup and costume and music and script, yet it wasn't blush that danced to gravity's eulogy, wasn't rope that hurtled and spun with open contempt for the laws of physics. When The Under's lead actor concluded his act with one final dive into the black pool, Erwin struggled to pry his pallid hands from the arms of his seat.

Erwin joins a local community theater group. Just something to do when there's a lull in his schedule. No one knows who he is. They laugh freely but without malice when he overacts or ties up his tongue over a monologue. It's the most fun he's had in years. 

The man had played a young, haughty jackdaw who wiled away his days until his first winter greeted him with a blizzard that kissed each feather solid. The clothing and makeup had been otherworldly, the rigging invisible, the lighting eclipsing cinema. But that wasn't it, none of it was. It was him. Erwin knew everyone in the industry, had traveled across the world and learned half a dozen languages conversationally so that he might study with them, learn from them, and they, from him. 

Erwin visits another friend in Vegas, a former Lune stage tech. They catch up and go to a few shows, have a few drinks. He visits again the next weekend, and the next. He's showed off - discreetly - to the other techs and stage crew, but he doesn't mind. He could do worse than befriend the people whose hands keep him in the air and out of a hospital. 

Simply discovering his name had been a trial. No programs were distributed, no posters or names were displayed anywhere, and the cast and crew vanished after the final bow. He had asked everyone he knew, asked until he came across a similar look in some of them, in the older performers. A hard look. A _do not ask again_ look.

He soon discovered not only his name but the reason he shouldn't have asked. And he shouldn't have asked. 

A few weekends later, Erwin is drinking with a friend of a friend of his former Lune tech. She is more than content to grouse about crew work to him, who knows enough to make sympathetic gestures, but not enough to offer unsolicited advice. They leave the bar before a fight escalates too nearby for comfort.

The door swings shut behind them. Erwin is saying his goodbyes when she interrupts.

"Not bad, Smith. Most try to buy their way in."

"Sorry?"

She scoffs. "Don't think I don't know what you've been doing."

He tries not to look too surprised. He'd been prepared to wine and dine her and a few other suspects for months. He hadn't even been sure she was the one, only harboring a gut feeling the longer she talked without mentioning so much as a single name, street corner, bus route. Only unannounced productions insist on such secrecy. They, and maybe one other.

"So what do you want?" she prompts as neon paints her red and blue and green. She lights a cigarette with bandaged hands. It illuminates a recent rope burn on her jaw. "Autograph, picture, lock of hair-"

"I would like to audition."


End file.
